I imagine that they did get cleaned up; what you were seeing was likely the accumulated damage and scarring from dozens of launches and re-entries, like in the photos below.
Phil Engelauf. Thanks for sharing the name. I did not know his name. Yes he and Ellen Ochoa were apparently the first in Mission Control to learn about the news reports showing Columbia disintegrating, and they’re the ones who inform flight director LeRoy Cain. As you say. In the documentary when they show that moment they refer to him as a former flight director, or a retired flight director. Something like that.
Didn’t they also remove the bipod? The foam losses seemed to be where the bipod (which connects the orbiter to the external tank (ET)), connects to the ET.
I’d have to look it up. But, that does sound right.
I’ve been answering from memory.
I found it.
From here, https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/114020main_et_bipod_fs.pdf —
“NASA redesigned the external tank’s forward bipod fitting after the Columbia disaster to reduce debris. The new design removes the insulating foam bipod ramps, allowing the tank to fly with the fittings mostly exposed.”
Dianne Vaughan published “The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA” in 1996. This was a study of NASA management’s faulty risk decision process of the Shuttles O-Rings that led to the lost of Challenger in 1986. Seventeen years later, the exact same management failure occurred with Columbia.
One of Vaughan’s concepts in her study was called “Normalization of Deviance”, whereby a workplace culture environment accepts “deviant acts” as normal and acceptable even though these acts are objectively wrong as defined by outside of the organization or even by internal definition. This happens over time for various reasons, but mainly because the deviations don’t immediately cause harm or loss.
Where did I learn about it? On the SDMB, of course. The thread that is linked upthread.